Creeley, Robert, 1926-2005

Robert White Creeley was born on May 21, 1926, in Arlington, Massachusetts.

He was an American poet, writer, publisher, and professor. In 1943, he attended Harvard University but left to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944–1945. He returned to Harvard in 1946 but graduated from Black Mountain College (B.A., 1955) and the University of New Mexico (M.A., 1960). He was a chicken farmer briefly in Littleton, New Hampshire, before becoming a teacher in 1949. From 1951 to 1955, Creeley and his family lived on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Together with the British writer Martin Seymour-Smith, they started a publishing company Divers Press. Creeley wrote about half of his published prose while living on the island, including a short-story collection, “The Gold Diggers” (1954), and a novel, “The Island” (1963). He taught at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (1961-1969, 1978-1980), University of British Columbia, Vancouver (1962-1963), and the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1967 to 2003, when he was appointed a professor at Brown University. Creeley received fame in 1962 for his poetry collection “For Love”. He won numerous awards, e.g., Leviton-Blumenthal Prize (1964); Shelley Award (1981) and Frost Medal (1987), both from Poetry Society of America; Chancellor Norton Medal (1999); Before Columbus Lifetime Achievement Award (1999); Bollingen Prize (1999), and Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award (with Edward Said), Lannan Literary Foundation (2001). He was the New York State Poet laureate from 1989 until 1991. Creeley was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

In 1946, he married Ann McKinnon (1925–2009). They divorced in 1957, and he remarried twice (1957 and 1977). He died on March 30, 2005, in Odessa, Texas.